Reddit wants more users and more money from Google in exchange for an even bigger mountain of data feeding its AI machine, according to Bloomberg. The negotiation shows a new front in the struggle between Big AI and content providers as they try to harvest new revenue streams without bleeding out the very traffic and engagement that keep them alive.
A year and a half after cutting its first data-sharing deal with Google, reportedly worth $60 million a year, unnamed executives say Reddit is back at the negotiating table eyeing an even bigger role inside the company’s AI ecosystem. The platform is reportedly eager for Google to help entice users – who get an answer farmed from Reddit and leave – into posting in Reddit’s forums, which would generate more of the very content tech giants need to train their data-hungry AI models.
Reddit also wants more money for its data. The platform is reportedly considering a dynamic pricing-style arrangement for future licensing deals with companies like Google and OpenAI, a system where pay would be determined by how useful or important content is to the answers generated by AI tools.
Executives reportedly believe current terms do not reflect how valuable Reddit data is to AI companies. Reddit is in a stronger position than most to make this claim and it has been exceptionally useful to tech firms training AI models. In a slop-ridden internet, Reddit posts are made by real people speaking candidly, content is well-sorted by theme, and it is all ranked according to a human-run voting system, not an algorithm. Data suggests Reddit is the top cited domain for AI tools like Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, and adding “reddit” to Google search queries is a well-known hack to get more useful answers from search engines.
The push for better terms — particularly terms that go beyond money and help keep content-providers alive — underscores the paradox at the center of many AI licensing deals: platforms like Reddit hold troves of data tech companies need to train their AI models, only for them to watch those same models strangle the traffic and activity that made them valuable in the first place.